Who would have thought that the director of American Beauty and Revolutionary Road would make a film with an optimistic attitude about the power and strength of love? But that’s exactly what Sam Mendes has done with Away We Go, a story about two people searching for their place in this world, and finding it in each other. After the cynicism and “hopeless emptiness” of his previous projects, Mendes’ latest effort offers a refreshingly realistic and supportive couple who take on the world together as a unified team. The result is a sweet little film that doesn’t attempt to confront any grand, philosophical issues, but approaches life-sized dilemmas thoughtfully, without manufactured conflict or forced sentimentality.

Co-written by married novelists Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, the story follows expectant parents Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) as they travel around the country looking for a place to settle after Burt’s self-involved parents (Catherine O’Hara and Jeff Daniels, the first wave in a steady tide of terrific supporting players) announce they’re moving to Belgium a month before the baby’s due. Determined to live near someone they know, Burt and Verona set out to visit friends, relatives and acquaintances in different cities, from Phoenix to Madison to Montreal. The road trip that follows becomes a sort of Dante’s Inferno-esque tour through successively awful circles of nightmare parenting scenarios.

The first stop introduces us to Verona’s mouthy former boss Lily (Allison Janney) and her willfully pessimistic husband Lowell (Jim Gaffigan) , who turn a day-long outing at the dog track into a sort of white-trash version of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That’s followed by a visit with Verona’s sister (Carmen Ejogo) in Tucson, where we get a little of her closely guarded backstory. Then it’s on to Madison and a disastrous dinner with Burt’s childhood friend LN (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her partner Roderick (Josh Hamilton), who flaunt their trust-fund-supported neo-bohemian lifestyle and embrace a very specific method of child rearing – “no sugar, no separation, no strollers.” Just as Janney does in her scenes, Gyllenhaal dives right into her contemptible character, and the scene escalates into one of the laugh-out-loud funniest sequences of the entire film.

Vastly different situations are explored in Montreal – where Burt and Verona’s college friends Tom (Chris Messina) and Munch (Melanie Lynskey) have built a loving home for a multiracial brood of adopted kids – and Miami – where Burt’s brother (Paul Schneider) is dealing with the departure of his wife and his sudden status as a single dad. There are no big revelations or showy fireworks at the climax of the film, just a simple understanding as Burt and Verona come to terms with their past, present and future through the lessons they’ve learned on their journey.

Mendes takes a naturalistic, low-key approach to the material, making good use of the different locations to set the chapters apart from one another. Along with cinematographer Ellen Kuras, he gives each destination a distinctive feel, from the overly bright, sunburned desert hues of Phoenix to the rich, smoky dive bars of Montreal to the soft pastels of Miami. Thankfully, he resists the road-movie cliche of long tracking shots showing nothing but scenery, often transitioning between segments in more interesting ways, such as a view of a plane reflected in the mirrored glass of a building.

What keeps all these strands connected in a single through line is the performances of Krasinski and Rudolph. Here is the best example of the old adage that comic actors often do the best dramatic work, and their palpable chemistry makes for a believable, if unconventional, couple. Verona steadfastly refuses to marry Burt, but her true reasons are oddly romantic when they’re finally revealed. As many successful couples do, they seem to instinctively correspond to each other’s peaks and valleys, taking turns being the one to freak out and the one to provide reassurance.

Of the two, Verona is the more reserved, maintaining a quiet strength that belies a depth of emotion. Fans who only know Rudolph from her work on SNL may be surprised at her range here and how well she functions as the straight woman in the film. When we first meet Verona, she’s a bit of a mystery, closed off and unwilling to talk about her past. But as the film goes on and she slowly opens up, it’s like watching a flower bloom in time-lapse. When she’s ultimately called upon to deliver a long, riveting monologue near the end of the film, she makes it look effortless.

Similarly, with the help of glasses, a shaggy mop of hair and a bristly beard, Krasinski sinks into the role of Burt like a comfy pair of shoes. His slightly rumpled, rough-around-the edges style is miles away from The Office’s Jim Halpert. Though the two characters may be compared in their affability and their unfaltering love and support of their significant others, that’s where the similarities end. Burt is filled with a childlike, almost naive, enthusiasm that’s nicely complemented by Rudolph’s motherly qualities. And though he has some of the funniest bits in the film, when situations arise that strip away that genial veneer, it is something to behold. This is Krasinski’s best feature-film role date, and with more projects like this under his belt, he’s assured of a long, steady career beyond The Office.

The other element that holds the film together is the soundtrack, provided for the most part by singer-songwriter Alexi Murdoch. Having a single artist predominate the score ends up working nicely as a connective device. His wistful guitar refrains give the journey a forward momentum, seamlessly carrying us from one chapter to the next, and his deep, honeyed voice sets a contemplative tone that underscores some of the film’s best and most emotional moments.

Some audiences may avoid this film because it reeks of an indie sensibility, while others may have soured on Mendes as a director after Revolutionary Road. While both of those predispositions are valid, there’s a lot more to Away We Go than meets the eye. Like a typical independent film, it eschews glossy imagery and extravagant production values for a more ordinary, grounded point of view, but it doesn’t have any lofty aspirations or take itself too seriously. It’s just a basic, well-acted road movie that will break your heart and put it back together again.

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According to Christopher Monfette of IGN.com, this is one Hangover that you won’t want to go away.

Almost more than any other genre, comedy is virtually critic-proof, completely and utterly subjective in the face of your own sense of humor. Nine times out of ten, a black cat leaping out of an alley will scare most people. More often than not, a weepy scene between loved ones parted by either distance or death will elicit an audience’s sympathy. But when it comes to comedy, unless there’s simply nothing of good, old-fashioned, laugh-out-loud value, anything beyond a guy slipping on a banana peel or taking a shot to the nuts – which are universally funny – is ultimately at the mercy of taste. And so, it turns out, the absence of funny can be measured; the presence of funny is entirely up to you.

With that in mind, if it were up to this critic, The Hangover would easily be praised as potentially the funniest comedy to hit theatres in the last few years. It’s been awhile since I remember having laughed this hard or having been so effortlessly amused by a movie, and where so many Bachelor Party-inspired comedies grab too quickly for the low-hanging fruit of nudity and vulgarity – neither of which are necessarily bad, mind you — The Hangover manages to create a clever mystery and real, honest-to-goodness characters in the midst of its many of shenanigans. And that’s a surprise, quite frankly, given what this Las Vegas-set comedy could easily have become, but despite a few pacing issues in the middle of the film, The Hangover rises above the trappings into which other, similar comedies have so often stumbled.

It’s the eve of Doug’s wedding, and so his two best friends, Phil and Stu (Bradley Cooper and Ed Helms), as well as his fiancé’s slightly off-balance brother, Alan (Zach Galifianakis), take Doug for a wild night in Vegas prior to the big day. And before you can say “What could possibly happen!?” the s**t gets real. Cut to twelve hours later when Phil, Stu and Alan wake up in a luxury suite, sans Doug, with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a stolen police car downstairs at the valet, and absolutely no memory of the previous evening. The big question is, “Where’s Doug?” but to answer that the gang has to retrace their steps from the night before, making The Hangover a kind of comedic mystery involving a hooker, an imprisoned Chinese mobster, a pissed-off Mike Tyson and an assortment of progressively stranger encounters. Also praiseworthy are the subtle, completely logical clues that the film provides the audience as to where Doug may have vanished, leaving the sharper-eyed viewers with a sense of accomplishment that they might have put things together before our main characters.

It’d be easy to simply set up an insane scenario, populating a room with animals and objects, and let the audience’s imaginations fuel the laughs – which, indeed, they do for the first portion of the film – but where The Hangover succeeds is in making the truth of what actually happened live up to the promise of the aftermath. That said, the film is admittedly funniest in its first half, but that director Todd Phillips and writers Jon Lucas and Scott Moore were able keep the back half as amusing as they did is as much a tribute to the film’s comedic chops as to the absolutely hysterical performances from Cooper, Helms and Galifianakis.

You’d be hard-pressed to name a better-matched comedy trio since Phillips’ own Old School back in 2003, but where Luke Wilson, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn seemed like separate elements competing for the comedy crown, these hungover friends work seamlessly together to earn and support almost every single laugh. Cooper is the likable but smarmy, self-obsessed pack-leader who, despite his ego, undoubtedly loves his buddies, while Helms plays the brow-beaten straight man with the domineering girlfriend. Galifianakis, however, completely steals the movie as the eccentric Alan, who may or may not be developmentally challenged…Make no mistake, this is the movie that will pull Galifianakis from the realm of the cult comedian into the mainstream, but one wonders if playing awkward, quasi-simpletons isn’t simply his trademark shtick. If so, it’ll certainly limit how far Galifianakis can go as an actor and calls into question whether he could ever carry a movie as a lead, but he’s just so damn funny that we can’t help but hope that he has a long, successful career in cinematic comedy ahead of him.

The only real failing of the film is its second act, which suffers from some minor pacing issues, and a 15-minute lull where the laughs simply aren’t as abundant. And that the determination regarding just where Doug disappeared to ultimately comes from a play on words during a seemingly random dialogue exchange – rather than from a legitimate clue – seems a bit too easy, like the writers were looking for a quick way to shift gears into the third act. Thankfully, however, the third act stuff – which could have felt as if the film had given up or lost its steam – actually regains some of the comedic punch of the opening moments, culminating in a series of photographs that’ll have audiences howling riotously in their seats throughout the credits.

The Hangover could easily have been a cheap, crass, throwaway comedy, but with a great cast and a solid director, audiences are about to get one of the most bankable, legitimately hilarious films we’ve seen in quite some time. With a possible sequel already given the greenlight, we’re hoping that this same group can capture lightning in a bottle one more time.

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Perhaps this is an obvious question, but how is it that Pixar — no matter how high the expectations for their movies may be — almost always manages to trump those expectations? Sure, a DreamWorks or Blue Sky may come along with a Kung Fu Panda or Ice Age here or there and surprise everyone with success, but for Pixar, the only surprise is how their films work even better than you might have hoped they would.

As with last year’s WALL.E, Up begins in a less conventional manner than one might expect from a mainstream animated film. WALL.E had its famous wordless first act, and now this picture features a similarly effective — and quite affecting — sequence early on depicting the lifelong relationship between lead characters Carl and Ellie as they meet, fall in love, marry, and eventually grow old together until one of them dies. Subtly, of course, so as to not freak out the kiddies in attendance.

The one who doesn’t die is Carl, voiced by Ed Asner. Having lost his bubbly Mary Tyler Moore, the pushing-80 Carl has nothing left in life to keep his spirits up, as they say. And yet while this geriatric animated character has taken an emotional licking, he keeps on ticking, working through his daily routine of getting out of bed, cleaning the house, dressing, and heading out to… sit on the porch, talking to his dear departed Ellie, who in his mind has come to be represented by the home the pair shared all those years.

The design of these events is stunning throughout, with the climactic action scenes onboard the ersatz Douglas’ dirigible at least matched by the less flashy down-to-Earth shots of Carl dragging his slowly deflating house-balloon through the jungle. Oh-so-slightly deflated as well is one’s enthusiasm for the material late in the film, which becomes slightly more generic good-guy-vs.-bad-guy stuff when compared to the inspired opening sequences of the movie. And yet, in the end Up turns out to not be an action movie or a comedy or a kid’s film, or even necessarily a mere animated movie, but rather a beyond-the-grave love story between Carl and his lost bride. And if a tear or two is shed in the audience due to this heartfelt plotline, well, at least you’ll have your 3-D glasses to hide behind.

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Most are too young to be even vaguely aware of Woodstock Music and Art Fair these days. But the impact of the three-day celebration of peace and music on a dairy farm in Bethel, New York back in 1969 marked the pinnacle of the hippie era and saw nearly half a million people descend on the 600-acre site. Acts included Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, The Who and Jimi Hendrix and the fest was an unprecedented event in music history.

Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock is the tale of Elliot Tiber (oddly renamed Teichberg in the movie), president of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, who held the only permit for a music festival in the area (he planned to put on a chamber music show) and invited the event’s organisers to the town when they were denied a permit in the nearby town of Wallkill. Based on his autobiography, we join him as a young man (Demetri Martin) struggling to maintain his parent’s motel business and coming to terms with his sexuality.

When he reads that the permit for the Wallkill has been pulled, he pitches the idea of bringing the festival to Bethel to promoter Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff). Before long, plans are underway to run the show on Max Yasgur’s farm, proving a much-needed investment of capital into Tiber’s motel, which the organisers use to house themselves and their offices while the show comes together.

The film is really about Elliot’s journey without moving. While struggling with his own identity and his responsibilities to his parents – a battleaxe mother (Imelda Staunton) and ailing father (Henry Goodman) – he welcomes an incredibly liberal collection of people to his town who teach him the value of personal identity. It’s an incredibly powerful theme punctuated brilliantly by Liev Schreiber as a transvestite ex-marine, of whom Elliot asks if his father understands what he is. He replies, “Honey, I know who I am. That should make it easier for everyone else.”

Maybe it’s not surprising to see a film with powerful homosexual themes from Lee, who was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, but he explores the subject with an impressively deft hand, making Elliot’s journey remarkably genuine. The real Tiber was present for the Stonewall riots, which happened weeks before the film’s timeline begins, but Lee and screenwriter James Schamus focus their adaptation on a young man whose sexuality isn’t so assured before the film begins and allows the audience to take the film’s journey with him.

It’s not quite as successful in that respect as Almost Famous, another film about a young man’s journey into the world of live music, as Patrick Fugit’s character in that film is, perhaps, less affected by a history that isn’t spelled out within the film. But Taking Woodstock is as much about Elliot’s journey as it is about the foundations of the music festival. In the clash of big business and hippie ideals that gave birth to the show it’s a film both funny and engaging. On the sidelines, Emile Hirsch as a Vietnam vet and Paul Dano as an Acid-dropping hippie provide drama and comedy respectively, while Dan Fogler is hilarious as the leader of an alternative theatre troop whose main artistic contribution to the world seems to be to dance around naked.

When the festival kicks off, Elliot is nowhere near the action – if nothing else, clearing rights to that material would have been mighty tricky – but Lee gives a comfortable sense of scale in cleverly chosen CG shots mixed, predominantly, with vast scenes involving extras.

It may not be on a par with Brokeback, nor as powerful as Lust, Caution, but Taking Woodstock is another triumph for Ang Lee, a director whose resume gets more and more diverse with every project he tackles.

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May 14, 2009 – There comes a point when you’ve innovated something as far as it can possibly go, added all that you could conceivably add, discovered all that there was to discover, so that nothing can ever again be new. For the most part, the con-man genre is like this, and if you draw a line back through cinematic history, you can trace the evolution of the double-cross in the most basic of terms. It began with a lie – one character deceiving another in such a way that the audience was in on the scam. And for awhile, the lie was enough. We were content to know exactly where the ball was at any point during the shell game. Whether the target would figure out the con was thrill enough for us. But then we got smarter, wiser, more demanding, and filmmakers delivered the triple-cross, or simply added another element to the con, shuffling around the shells at such a rate and speed that while the audience was aware of the deception, the conclusion was always surprising.

Then came the point at which the characters themselves were no longer sufficient victims. We’d gotten too good at spotting the bait-and-switch, the sleight-of-hand, and so the filmmakers were then forced to con us, the viewers. The story would seemingly end, the con would be revealed, and then, in a surprising twist on the twist, we would discover that somehow, in some way, we had been fooled, the final, unspoken players in the confidence game.

So con movies became clever while audiences became smarter and if we weren’t already a step ahead, we were hardly ever that far behind. Thankfully, Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom injects some desperately needed vigor into this waning genre. The follow-up to Brick, Johnson’s ode to the “film noir” motif, Bloom is filled with first-rate scams, refreshing whimsy and incredibly well-layered performances, yet it aims to be something greater than simply another drop in the con-man bucket. It’s smarter than that, and the con being played upon the audience is that we’re watching a brilliant and thoughtful deconstruction of the genre without really knowing it.

The story of two brothers, Stephen and Bloom (played by Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody, respectively), the film follows their efforts to pull “One Last Con” on a mega-wealthy shut-in, Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz). Having shut herself up for years in her sprawling estate, the richest woman on the Eastern Seaboard has become a virtual outcast, studying and learning every craft from every book available to her. Stephen, who writes his cons with all the grace and symbolism of classic literature, is clearly in love with his work, both storyteller and character all at once, while Bloom seeks to lead what Stephen refers to as “an unwritten life.”

And it’s this basic premise – the ability to lead a life un-scripted by family or fate – that makes The Brothers Bloom perhaps the most entertaining and dare we say important con movie of the last several years, delivering consistently on all levels. Of course, Penelope quickly transcends the title of victim to join in on a bigger con – and it’s to Johnson’s credit that we’re never quite certain if the brothers are still playing her, if Stephen is playing Bloom, if somebody else is playing all of them, or if they’re all actually being honest with one another.

Johnson takes a sizeable step forward as a director with this film, which feels almost 180-degrees away from the dark, brooding tone of Brick. This is a colorful movie, full of grand sequences and vibrant set pieces. It moves quickly and freely, embracing a never-too-quirky sense of style that makes the story feel more in the vein of a Wes Anderson film – most especially the opening prologue. The banter is quick and smart and poignant, and each actor rises effortlessly to their character.

It’s likely that audiences have yet to see the uber-dramatic Ruffalo in a role quite this light, and while Stephen certainly passes through his fair share of drama throughout the film, Ruffalo shows a side of himself that’s considerably less intense and vastly more accessible than his more gruff, tortured roles. His relationship with Brody, his brother, is wonderfully complex – full of love and loathing – and, in turn, Brody’s relationship with Weisz is breezily romantic. And yet, each of these pairings are obscured by the constant presense of “the con” and we’re never fully able to trust our footing in any given situation.

There is no excessively self-clever ending to Bloom – the film simply isn’t as concerned with executing the perfect con as it is with watching it fall apart – and somewhere in between the drama and comedy, the whimsy and the tragedy, the idea of the “unwritten life” is ever-present. The Brothers Bloom will undoubtedly have a place among the better, if not the best, films about con-men, but it’s also a film about family and trust and the limits of both. Do yourself a favor and give yourself over to the shell game because it doesn’t matter where the ball turns up, so much as that you played at all.

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Read the Star Trek review courtesy of Jay Stone of canada.com

J.J. Abrams’ re-invention of the venerable sci-fi saga presents the origins of Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto) and the rest of a familiar cast. It’s a nice, unpretentious adventure that will delight the fans. Even those who know nothing about the franchise except the phrase “Beam me up, Scotty” may find themselves turning into late-stage Trekkies.

Every time I see one of these space epics, I’m reminded of the Mel Brooks plan to do a satire that would be called Intergalactic Mishigas. There’s a bit of that in Star Trek, but not too much: director J.J. Abrams has found a balance between excitement and knowingness. Beam me up, Scotty, and give it all she’s got.

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“He’s strong to the finish, ’cause he eats his spinach…”

Usually the above jingle would culminate, naturally, with: “He’s Popeye the sailor man!” But it comes to mind when discussing the highly entertaining Crank High Voltage not only because of the film’s overtly cartoonish approach, but also for its main character’s constant reliance on an external energy source in order to get the job done. Of course, whereas our favorite cockeyed sailor only needed a can of green vegetables in order to pummel Bluto, High Voltage’s Chev Chelios requires something a bit more modern — namely electricity, and lots of it.

That’s somehow appropriate given the videogame and pop-culture influences of the Crank series. The first film also starred Jason Statham as Chelios, a hitman looking to retire who has the craziest day of his life when he’s poisoned by a rival and must keep his adrenaline flowing in order to stay alive long enough to find his “killers.” Or at least, that was his craziest day before this sequel kicked in, which picks up at the exact moment of the first film’s final moments when Chelios plummeted from a helicopter and crashed to the street below — and seemingly survived.

As High Voltage begins, a band of Triad gangsters make off with Chelios’ unconscious body and quickly perform some makeshift open-heart surgery in the back of a massage parlor. The super-heart of Chelios is removed, apparently for its intrinsic value, and replaced with a mechanical pumper that has a very limited lifespan. Three months pass, and Chelios finally makes his escape from these villains when he realizes that his captors are planning on harvesting the rest of his organs — including his “horse c@$k.”

So the superhuman Chelios must find his heart, but he soon realizes that he has to keep his artificial ticker powered up in order to continue the sprinting, fighting, and killing that takes place almost nonstop over the course of the film’s hour-and-a-half running time. That leads to the electricity previously mentioned, which is derived from all manner of sources — tasers, car batteries, power plants, and so on. It also leads to the over-the-top cartoonishness of it all, as any semblance of reality is drained from the film like a car that’s had its headlights on all night.

And let’s take a moment to thank writer-directors Brian Taylor and Mark Neveldine for not feeling the urge to keep these proceedings “real” at all, because that’s what makes the film so much fun and separates it from the typically mechanical and repetitious action genre. We’ve got a whole summer’s worth of that junk coming at us soon enough, thank you very much.

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Based on the BBC miniseries of the same name, State of Play is as much an elegiac swan song to print journalism as it is a gripping political thriller. But State of Play is more than just a paean or whodunit; it is really about moral compromises. The story — scripted by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), Matthew Carnahan (Lions for Lambs) and Billy Ray (Breach) — follows overweight, slovenly but dogged Washington Globe investigative reporter Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) as he discovers that a string of seemingly unrelated murders are all connected.

Worse, the unfolding case embroils his old college pal, Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck), in a sex-and-murder scandal that threatens to extinguish his once-promising political career. Is Collins the killer of his staff member and mistress Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer), or is PointCorp. — the private military company that Collins has been investigating in televised congressional hearings — really behind it? The closer that Cal and his partner, blogger and aspiring “serious” journalist Della Frye (Rachel McAdams), get to finding out the truth behind Sonia’s slaying the more dangerous it gets for them and their already imperiled newspaper as cops, power brokers, spin doctors and soldiers of fortune all come gunning for them.

Every character in State of Play is compromised to varying degrees: Cal is too close to Stephen to understand how much he’s blurred the lines between media and politics, and his friendship with Stephen’s wife Anne (Robin Wright Penn) may also be closer than it seems; Collins’ moral shortcomings are obvious from the plot synopsis, with his idealism being stronger than his integrity; Della comes from a new breed of reporter (“bloodsuckers and bloggers,” as the film calls them) who are more important in being “first!” than in being good at what they do; and Globe Editor in Chief Cameron Lynne (Helen Mirren) seems to be losing the battle between balancing her journalistic principles with the commercial necessities of keeping her paper’s owners happy. No one comes off looking too heroic or clean in State of Play, a gutsy move on the part of a major studio production to keep it real.

The cast is excellent across the board. Crowe owns the movie as the slobby but sly reporter who relies on old-fashioned tools such as notepads, door-to-door interviews and schmoozing all the right people (mostly cops) who can supply him with information. This could be the movie that makes audiences fall in love with Crowe again after a spell of flops and bad publicity. Affleck gives his best performance in years (if not ever) as Collins, although the nearly unanimous opinion among those who have seen the film is that it’s simply unbelievable to buy fortysomething Crowe and thirtysomething Affleck as former college roommates. One line change (e.g., Cal worked on Stephen’s campaign or was his T.A. in college or grad school) could have dispelled that entirely justifiable criticism. It also doesn’t help that Penn is closer to Crowe’s age than Affleck’s (all three characters knew each other in college). Penn plays Anne’s wounded pride well in a disappointingly small role.

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Paul Rudd is hilariously in the this bromance comedy about a dork that just wants to fit in, but try as he may – he always gets it wrong.

In I Love You, Man, which is by far the best Judd Apatow comedy that Judd Apatow had nothing at all to do with, Paul Rudd gives a startlingly funny and original performance as a nice guy with serious dweebish tendencies, and the delight of what Rudd does here comes down to how exquisitely embarrassing he is to watch. He makes you wince in hilarity. Rudd, in films like Role Models and Wet Hot American Summer, has been a wiseass par excellence, and maybe it took a wiseass to play a dork with this much merciless understanding. His Peter Klaven is an L.A. real estate agent (he’s selling Lou Ferrigno’s mansion) who has just gotten engaged, an event that forces him to confront the fact that he has no male friends. Who will be his groomsmen? His best man?

That sounds like a fairly mild predicament to hang a movie on, but the resonant joke of 
I Love You, Man is that the reason Peter has no pals is that he’s too sweetly sincere, too in touch with his sensitive side, to indulge in 
the gloriously insensitive modes of male bonding: the reckless sex chatter and sports talk, the need to be a guy, a dude. Peter meets 
 Sydney (Jason Segel), who seems like natural buddy material, and the two begin to hang out. But the more Peter tries to get down with his masculine self, the more our jaws drop at how bad he is at it. He does agonizingly out-of-date SNL routines as if they signified he was ”in the know,” he says things like ”me slappa da bass” in a ”reggae” accent, and when his new friend nicknames him Pistol, he names him back — and sounds like a complete idiot jackass.

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The filmmakers of the latest haunted house flick, The Haunting in Connecticut actually finds a way to make the sound effects sound and feel scary and the actors do a good job as well.

The latest horror film “based on a true story” — the facts of which are documented here — The Haunting in Connecticut follows the Campbell family, who move into a Victorian house in upstate Connecticut in order to be closer to where their teenage son receives his cancer treatments.

Matt (played by Kyle Gallner, known to fanboys as Bart “Flash” Allen in Smallville) is slowly dying from the disease. His mom Sara (Virginia Madsen) and recovering alcoholic dad Peter (Martin Donovan) can barely accept this grim reality as they struggle to make ends meet amidst mounting medical bills. Trouble begins almost as soon as the Campbells move into their new home.

Matt is plagued by disturbing visions of a boy not much younger than himself, but he’s reluctant to admit it because he fears the disease has progressed to his brain or that the drugs he’s on aren’t working and he’ll be removed from his clinical trial. Meanwhile, the family discovers an embalming chamber in their home and a collection of creepy photos of corpses, and realize that their new home was a funeral parlor back in the 1920s. Noises, disturbances and other assorted scary incidents mount and the family realize they’re under attack from beyond the grave. The ghostly boy Matt has been seeing is that of Jonah, the clairvoyant son of the former funeral home owner, who acts as a gateway for the dead to cross over into the realm of the living.

I’ve been watching a slew of ghost movies and supernatural films lately, and even the best of them aren’t really all that terrifying so much as they are creepy and disturbing or a collection of amusement park “scares.” The haunted house movie, in particular, has been done to death; if there’s one thing they’ve taught us, it’s the bigger the house and the more remote its location then the worse your haunting will be. (How come no one is haunted by ghosts when they move into a studio apartment in Van Nuys?) Nowadays, the scariest thing about these big old houses is how much their value has plummeted.

That said, The Haunting in Connecticut is a relatively effective scary movie despite its overall formulaic nature. The actors, sound effects, and ghoulish makeup compensate when the story takes turns into more familiar territory. Sure, we’ve heard creaks and thumps and wooshes and wails in plenty of other ghost movies, but the filmmakers actually find a way here to make them sound scary again. Director Peter Cornwell ratchets up the tension, maintaining a consistent level of chills for the duration of the movie before it ultimately buckles under the weight of its effects-heavy finale.

The film has very human and relatable characters at its core — a family that was already in peril due to the terminal illness of a family member — that keeps the viewer engaged in the story even as things grow more fantastical.

Click here to read the entire review on IGN.

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